Keep your Internet; we want books

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Whose kids are these, anyway? A new survey released by Scholastic Corp, the U.S. publisher of the Harry Potter books, shows that book publishers, newspaper proprietors and massive forest logging concerns have a future:

75 percent of kids age 5-17 agree with the statement, “No matter what I can do online, I’ll always want to read books printed on paper,” and 62% of kids surveyed say they prefer to read books printed on paper rather than on a computer or a handheld device.

And if you think that that dastardly Internet is going to turn the minds of children to pulp, guess again, the study says:

Kids who go online to extend the reading experience – by going to book or author websites or connecting with other readers – are more likely to read books for fun every day.

To break it down a bit, we see that boys tend to prefer the Internet for “fun” reading (54 percent vs. 46 percent) while girls prefer books (63 percent vs. 37 percent). And two-thirds of children believe that fun reading will be a primarily digital pastime in 10 years, as opposed, we suppose, to MANDATORY reading, which will still be on paper.